Frank Kermode, who died on 17 August 2010 at the age of 90, was the author of many books, including Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of an Ending (1967) and Shakespeare’s Language (2000). He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. He inspired the founding of the London Review in 1979, and wrote more than 200 pieces for the paper.

Out of Sight, out of Mind

Frank Kermode

A.J. Ayer, says Ben Rogers, had a ‘pampered upbringing, even by Edwardian standards’. He suffered much at prep school, then went to Eton, where he suffered less and got over it. The next move, to Christ Church, was painless. Oxford gave him Gilbert Ryle as his tutor and appointed him to a lectureship before he graduated.

Having volunteered for war service he was drawn, by the irresistible voice of privilege, into a Guards regiment. Thereafter his military career passed through several glamorous and comfortable stages: he was, in his own words, ‘a soldier in England, a British government official in the United States, an apprentice commando in Canada, a civil servant in the Gold Coast, a staff officer in London, a political observer in North Africa, a tourist in Italy and a liaison officer in the invasion of Southern France’. A little later, the Ambassador, Duff Cooper, declared that he was ‘extremely anxious to have him’, so Ayer became ‘a diplomat in Paris’, where he met everybody – Bataille, Artaud, Leiris, Giacometti, Tzara and so on. He had some affairs and developed an interest in Existentialism which produced good articles on Sartre and Camus. Times were hard for most Parisians, but Ayer lived in Guy de Rothschild’s house in Paris, supported by a butler, a cook and a good cellar.

When this arduous postwar service was over he returned to Oxford, at a time when philosophy in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was what went on in Cambridge. Ayer read Wittgenstein when hardly anybody else in Oxford thought of doing so. But at Ryle’s suggestion he gave up the idea of sitting at Wittgenstein’s feet in Cambridge and instead went to Vienna to work with Moritz Schlick – this at a time when hardly anybody in England had even heard of Logical Positivism. In his early twenties he published what is probably to this day the most widely read work of English philosophy, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and followed it with The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940). Late in life he doubted whether much of Language, Truth and Logic was right, and complained that students are required to read it primarily in order to pick holes in it; but it survives and sells by the thousand, partly, no doubt, because it is very well written. ‘Sixty years on,’ says Rogers, ‘the book’s vigour, elegance and ease are as remarkable as ever. Never has philosophy been so fast, so neat.’

In view of all these successes it may be surprising to find that Ayer habitually thought of himself as an ‘outsider’ and ‘self-made’, exaggerating the poverty of his family, looking at the world, as his widow, Dee Wells, puts it, with ‘big desiring eyes’, and, despite a career of equal brilliance as philosopher and hedonist, often a little anxious about where he stood on the borders of outside and inside.

Certainly Oxford, despite that lectureship, was reluctant to admit him to true insider academic status. Oxford philosophy was a competitive business; there were certain prizes that one had to win, the John Locke Prize, the All Souls Fellowship; but Ayer’s fate was to be pipped by his contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin, Goronwy Rees and the slightly younger J.L. Austin. As an undergraduate he had been taken up by Maurice Bowra and acquired a certain celebrity by having a mistress, but this was no help to his professional career. The wind that favoured Berlin and the others seemed set against him.

Letters

Frank Kermode’s review of Ben Rogers’s A.J. Ayer (LRB, 15 July) prompts me to enquire whether anyone knows why Ayer never met Wittgenstein. When I attended Wittgenstein’s ‘Conversation Class’ – three hours, three times a week – in 1933, Margaret Masterman, Richard Braithwaite’s wife, was attending on her husband’s behalf, after he had been banished for writing a piece in Cambridge Essays which dared to attempt an explanation of Wittgenstein’s ideas, in the course of saying it was the most important work in philosophy then current in Cambridge. It is not difficult to guess what Gilbert Ryle might have said to Ayer, but specific confirmation, if it were available, would be interesting.

George Barnard (Letters, 29 July) seems to have misunderstood Frank Kermode, who, in his review of Ben Rogers’s A.J. Ayer: A Life, said not that ‘Ayer never met Wittgenstein’ but that ‘at Ryle’s suggestion he gave up the idea of sitting at Wittgenstein’s feet in Cambridge and instead went to Vienna to work with Moritz Schlick.’ The two men did meet, on at least two occasions, both of which are described by Rogers, as they were earlier, and more fully, described by Ayer himself, in Part of My Life. Rogers and Ayer give divergent accounts of Ryle’s reasons for recommending that Ayer should study with Schlick rather than Wittgenstein. According to Rogers, Ayer’s ‘first thought had been to work under Wittgenstein at Cambridge. Ryle, however, argued that the veneration Wittgenstein expected from his students was bad for both teacher and pupil’ and Ryle ‘must have realised that Ayer was particularly ill-suited to sit at anyone’s feet’. But Ayer’s account is as follows:

My first inclination was to spend this time in Cambridge, learning all that I could from Wittgenstein, but Gilbert Ryle had what he thought was a better idea. He had met Moritz Schlick … and been very impressed by him. He therefore suggested that I should go to Vienna, enrol myself at the University, and learn as much as I could of the work that the Vienna Circle was doing. As almost nothing was known about them in England, he represented to me that by coming back with a report of their activities I should not only be benefiting myself but performing a public service.